With the increase in the number and complexity of the apparatuses that are coming into use in medical interventions of all types, especially in minimally invasive surgical operations as well as in diagnostic or non-invasive therapeutic procedures, there also come growing demands on the handling by the responsible physician. Therefore, to facilitate such handling, to increase security, and to improve documentation and administrative processes, by means of one or more control units, systems have been created in which a number of medical and non-medical apparatuses that are used in an operation can be handled.
Such installations for central monitoring and/or controlling apparatuses coming into use during an operation are known, for instance, from the publications DE 92 18 373 U1, EP 1 034 480 B1, or WO 02/19957, to which express reference is made for elucidating all details not described in greater detail here. DE 199 04 090 A1 discloses the connection of individual apparatuses and a master computer to one another by a CAN-bus, so that the individual apparatuses serve as slaves and the master computer as master; all apparatuses can be controlled by the master computer.
Because the functioning of the apparatuses being used is determined by various parameters, such as for instance insufflation pressure, high voltage current, and so on, it is foreseen that these parameters can be entered by means of an entry unit, such as a touch screen; also known in the art is the fact that apparatus parameters entered by the physician are stored in a memory device and can be called up from it for use in a later operation. Such a system for control of installations that are used in a surgical operation is proposed for instance by the KARL STORZ firm under the designation “OR1®” (see www.karlstorz.de).
The publications U.S. Pat. No. 6,708,184 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,490 teach means of making information from the Internet available for the physician during the operation, such as a digital anatomical atlas. Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,229 discloses the use of databases in the context of an integrated operation assistance and monitoring system, said databases being used for archiving patient information and for registration of parameters arising during the operation. Information stored in the databases, however, cannot be used for direct control of the medical apparatuses that are used during the surgical intervention.
DE 697 34 592 T2 discloses a system for controlling ophthalmologic surgical interventions that comprises surgical modules connected with microsurgical instruments, a data transmission bus, and a user interface. The user interface contains a processing device and a storage device for storing a number of apparatus parameters for the microsurgical instruments. By means of the processing device a group of parameters can be called up and transmitted by the data transmission bus to the surgical modules that control the microsurgical instruments, depending on the group of parameters called up from the storage device. The user interface comprises a menu in which the particular attending surgeon, for instance under his own name in a surgeon selection menu, can combine the apparatus parameters of the microsurgical instruments into separate groups that he considers advantageous for conducting a specific surgical intervention. These separate groups of parameters are filed in submenus to the master surgeon selection menu and are accordingly selected by the surgeon for conducting a particular operation. The publications U.S. Pat. No. 5,788,688 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,397,286 also teach that the surgeon, depending on the situation, can call up and use preferred apparatus configurations that have been previously defined for particular interventions and stored in a medical control system.
The disadvantage here is that the surgeon for a particular surgical procedure cannot resort to parameter values available in the system and apparatus configurations that have proven themselves in a number of surgical interventions of the same type. Instead, he himself must assemble the apparatuses required in a particular medical intervention and must implement the optimal parameter settings for them in the system in order to be able to have access to them in a concrete situation. This, however, is time-consuming and potentially error-prone, because it is not possible for every physician and every clinic to have the necessary experience to ascertain the optimal configurations and parameter values for all types of interventions and for all situations arising in practice.
It would thus be desirable to be able to utilize a widely available database of predetermined configurations and parameters of apparatuses that are independent of the particular physician and shown to be optimal in a number of operations and established by recognized specialists. On the other hand, such predetermined parameter values may not be the optimal ones for every individual case or for every patient. Therefore it is essential for safety reasons that the particular physician who is operating should, before the operation, become fully aware of the apparatus parameters that are to be entered and should accept them with a view to the concrete situation. However, it is impossible to exclude any possibility of neglecting this awareness in the midst of constantly recurring routine interventions or even in emergency and stress situations which always arise in operations.
It is therefore the object of the present invention to provide a system and a process for controlling and/or monitoring apparatuses in medical interventions, where in such a system or process, on the one hand, access is possible to generally valid apparatus configurations and parameters that are proved to be optimal in a number of comparable interventions, while on the other hand there is an assurance that the physician has taken positive note of them in every intervention.